


Silver Buttons All Down Her Back

by Duck_Life



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Prosthesis, animal crackers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 11:48:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4828031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia helps Luke get accustomed to the prosthetic hand by playing schoolyard clapping games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silver Buttons All Down Her Back

_Three sailors went to sea sea sea, to see what they could see see see, but all that they could see see see was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea._

Luke thinks he must’ve fallen asleep—or passed out—because he wakes up with Lando’s cape draped over him like a blanket. In that moment between sleep and full wakefulness, he can’t remember anything: why he’s laid up in the back of the Falcon, why his right arm feels oddly light.

It comes rushing back to him, like avalanching snow.

“Hey, there.” Luke turns his head to see Leia perched on the bench opposite him. “Back with us?”

He blinks, not sure how to answer. With everything he’s remembering, he sort of wishes he could just go back to sleep. Or being passed out. Whichever.

“Han?” he asks, and her expression drops immediately. He wonders if she’s been crying. It’s hard to tell, with Leia.

“We’ll get him back,” she promises. “Not now. We’ll get him back, though.”

Luke pushes himself up on the cot and grimaces when he accidentally leans on his right… nothing. The place where his hand used to be. Whichever.

Leia notices. “Let me see,” she says, extending her own two hands, and he’s immediately reminded of Beru reaching out to him, asking to examine a skinned knee. He holds his arm out to her, the clean cut, the cauterized wound. He, himself, feels sick looking at it, but Leia takes his wrist and leans in without flinching. “We’re on our way to a medical frigate,” she says without looking up. “They’ll fit you with a prosthetic.”

“Like a hook?” he says.

Now she glances up at him, looking like she might roll her eyes if she weren’t so worried. “Not like a hook.”

“Oh, come on, I need one, right?” He smirks, gently pulling his arm back. “I’m a pirate now.”

“You’re a Jedi.”

“A Jedi with a hook hand.”

_My sister is a show-off, My brother is a cowboy, BANG BANG, You're dead, Fifty bullets in your head, one here, and one there, and one went down your UNDERWEAR!_

Another ship, another trip. They’re minus one Wookie and one smooth-talking ex-baron administrator, plus one prosthetic limb. Threepio’s triple-checking the course trajectory with their pilot and Artoo’s… off doing whatever it is he does. Luke’s brooding and in denial about it.

“You’re brooding,” Leia says, throwing herself down on the bench beside him.

“No I’m not,” he says, broodily.

“Here.” In her hand is a box of crackers shaped like different creatures—womp rats, anoobas, mynocks. Luke accepts a frosted tauntaun. “How’s the hand?”

“Which one?” he says, munching. This time she does roll her eyes. “I don’t know. It’s different.”

“Better than nothing, right?” She pops a narglatch into her mouth.

Luke shrugs. “I… can’t really do anything with it.”

“Yet,” she says. “The dexterity takes a while to work right. You just need to practice, Luke.”

“How?” he asks, eating a bull rancor.

“You could take up knitting,” she says, and when he doesn’t laugh she sets down the box of animal crackers. “Here,” she says, holding her two hands out pressed against each other. “You remember how to play Shame?”

“I… haven’t done it since I was a kid.”

“So like last week?” she says, smirking, even though they’re the same age. “Which version did they play on Tatooine?”

“Uh…” he says, trying to remember blue milk and family dinner, two suns, the sand. It all seems so distant. “With the… the one with the Hutts. ‘There’s a big fat Hutt at the door, door, door.’”

“Oh, ours was about the Empire,” she says, her hands still out in front of her. “Come on, I’ll teach you.”

After a long moment, Luke mirrors her hands and they go back and forth, hands coming together at the knuckles in the middle, clapping up and down and then again in the middle.

“I don’t wanna go to Coruscant no more, more, more, there’s a big stormtrooper at the door, door, door. Grabbed us by our backs, made us pay a tax, I don’t wanna go to Coruscant no more, more, more SHAME!” Leia’s got a finger gun pointing straight at his face.

Luke fumbles a bit, the fingers of his prosthesis moving around but never able to point in the right way.  

“Practice,” she says again, but he looks more discouraged than ever.

“This is stupid,” he mumbles. Stupid or hopeless. Whichever.

“It’s all stupid,” she shrugs. “It’s war.”

“Well, I can’t…” He looks down. He looks dejected. “I don’t know if I should be fighting this war anymore.”

And then Leia’s had enough. “Stop that,” she says. “I’m sorry, I am, I’m sorry you were injured, and I’m sorry I have to be so harsh about it, but _damn it_ , Luke, we might’ve lost a man today. For good.” Again, Luke wonders if she’s been crying when he’s not there. The pondering gets stored away for later, it doesn’t matter; Leia’s mad at him. “I don’t know what Vader said to you, I know it shook you up, but _it doesn’t matter right now_. You’re alive, you’re fighting, you need to be _present_ and, yes, _dexterous_ , because we’re fighting a war here and I…” Her tirade pauses a moment. Luke looks down at his hands, one real, one fake, one old, one new. “I really thought he was going to kill you. Luke, I thought…”

He can tell what she means. _I thought I was going to lose you both_.

“Hey,” he says quietly. He reaches out to her, touches her shoulder with the prosthetic hand. “It’s okay. We’re okay. We’re not going anywhere.” He pauses. “Well, I mean, _we’re_ going somewhere, I guess, and Han’s going… wherever he’s going. But it’s going to be alright. Lando and Chewie are going after him. And we’re going to be alright.” He hands her a wampa from the animal cracker box. “We moon jockeys have to stick together.”

Gratefully, Leia takes the cracker, then looks back up at him. “I hope so.”

“And Vader wouldn’t have killed me,” he adds, but he still hasn’t told her, can’t tell her the Big Revelation, the one thing more traumatizing to him than losing a limb.

She blinks. “What makes you so sure?”

 _Because he’s my father_. “Because I think he wants me to join him,” he says, suddenly afraid as he says the words how she might react.

Leia chews her wampa-shaped animal cracker thoughtfully. “Will you?”

“ _Leia_.”

“I’m serious,” she says, and her eyes are still warm and she isn’t removing his hand from her shoulder but her tone’s changed, gotten colder and harder. She’s not Leia now, she’s Princess Leia, Leia the Senator, Leia the Rebel Leader.

“He _killed_ my _family_.”

“He was corrupted,” she says, as if this explains everything. Luke wonders if it does. “He used to be like you, just like you, a young Jedi with a lot of potential, and then the Dark Side seduced him and corrupted him. That’s what it _does_. I don’t know much about the Force but I know that. And I know you. And I _need_ to know if it could happen to you.”

 _So she can brace herself?_ he wonders. “I…” he starts, confused, concerned, startled at the turn this conversation has taken. He wants to sleep. He wants to go home, and he doesn’t know where that is.

“I’m not accusing you,” she says, gentler. “You know I’m not. You’re a good person. But Vader used to be a good person, too. We all start out as good people.” He stares at her, wondering where she fits in. “Is there… the _slightest_ possibility that what happened to him might happen to you?”

In the silence that follows, he stares down at the seat of the bench between them, the cold metal. _Is it something that happens to you_ , he thinks, _turning the Dark Side? Or is it something you do?_ Is it an action or a consequence? “It’s possible,” he says, so quietly.

Leia just nods.

For a while, they sit there, saying nothing, finishing the box of animal crackers. Once the box is empty, really _empty_ empty, all the little bits of banthas and bordoks eaten up, Leia licks the crumbs from her fingers and uses her pants to wipe her hands before holding them out to Luke.

“Do you know Miss Mary Mack?”


End file.
